The background description includes information that may be useful in understanding the present invention. It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art or relevant to the presently claimed invention, or that any publication specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
Operators of unattended machines (e.g., vending machine, kiosk, sign, sensor, monitoring device, etc.) need to be able to determine the status of the unattended machines they operate. They need to be able to monitor how the unattended machine is performing the function(s) for which it was designed (e.g., for a vending machine: dispensing its product, tracking how much product has been sold, etc.), machine conditions, etc. to be able to not only track the success of the machine from a performance perspective, but also be able to quickly and effectively deal with any operational issues that may arise in the unattended machine itself.
Some of these legacy unattended devices lack any type of data communication capabilities. To manage, monitor and otherwise operate these devices, the operators must visit the devices on-site to manually inspect them.
Other unattended machines often have WiFi or Ethernet communication capability, but that forces the machine's operator to be dependent upon the network administrators of the network in the premise where their machine is installed. This requires negotiation, results in blocked connections, and is often completely unavailable due to security policies of the premise. Machine owners and operators need a way to connect their unattended machines that does not depend upon third parties over which they have no control and little influence.
To address the need for the machine owner/operator to bypass the local premise network, they sometimes employ cellular communications for their machines. However, cellular communications can be unreliable. Cellular phone users are accustomed to dropped calls, dead zones, poor connections, the need to move to a different location, the need to stop and restart calls, and the need to turn off and on their phones. These steps are not possible when the machine is stationary and is unattended, resulting in unreliable cellular communications.
Moreover, for those unattended machines that do have some type of data exchange capability, they nevertheless lack connection awareness and connection intelligence. These machines are only programmed to focus on their host system functions—to perform the functions associated with the purpose of the device. These unattended machines may be able to diagnose a problem associated with performing its intended functions. However, because existing unattended machines lack the ability to monitor signal effectiveness, they would be unaware of any problems involving the ability to communicate the corresponding remotely-located operator computers or servers.
Thus, there is still a need for cellular communications that operate reliably and can resolve connectivity issues by autonomous, unattended means just as the host system is designed to operate in an unattended manner.